How to build a streetcar in 6 easy steps

United Streetcar is now building modern streetcars in the United States (click here for the story).  This graphic illustrates the process of building one.  Click on the image to enlarge and use Ctrl+mouse wheel to zoom.

Round Up: Transit Property Names

Transit property names make for a lean alphabet soup.  Especially among older agencies, acronyms condense the lengthy and the specific (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District) into the pat and the convenient (SEPTA, NICTD), monikers small enough to fit on tokens and double as logos.  But there are only so many words available for describing...

Streetcar Maiden, USA

Portland's first streetcars made in USA. Courtesy United Streetcar Skoda is a legendary firm dating from 1859 that has made weapons, brewing equipment, bridge parts, airplanes, and automobiles (now a separate division owned by Volkswagen).  Today the Czech company makes steam turbines and condensers, but the few Americans who are aware of Skoda probably know the company because of its transit...

The Met in Metro

  Shelters on the Sprinter Line in Charlotte are unique identifiers but also part of the urban fabric. Photo courtesy of CATS. Art has historically been public, civic – both a product of and contributor to collective identity.  From Egyptian glyphs to idealized Greek athletes, from Roman triumphal arches to intricate altar pieces, art condescends to tell us something about who we are, where...

Go Figure: Figure-ground as a Land Use/Transportation Tool

It has long been widely recognized by many city planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and historic preservationists, that, among many other influences, a viable community has a balanced relationship between building mass and open space that gives it a sense of compactness, spatial definition, and is in human scale. A typical figure-ground. This concern is even more relevant...

Tutorial: FTIS

If you ever have a need to find ridership or any other transit data from transit properties (including your own) then you need to know about FTIS.  It stands for the Florida Transit Information System.  The Florida in the name refers to the state where the system was developed and the DOT that made it, not to the data or who may use it.  It is an easy-to-use interface of the National Transportation...

Transit Shelter Advertising: Shelter Brought to You By . . .

Shelter image Michal Zacharzewski   Off-site advertising bans make ad-sponsored shelters tricky.  Why the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals might be the new BFF of JTA.  The video is excellent.  Mike Miller, Jacksonville Transit Authority Director of External Affairs, has been showing it to citizen groups, neighborhood associations, civic organizations, elected officials and others. ...

Streetcar Timeline

  From horse-drawn to recent hurricanes, here is the short history of the streetcar. Click to enlarge.

Cutting the Cord: Streetcars without Wires

  At the Americana at Brand in Glendale, CA, the money saved on overhead wires could be spent on lavish appointments for the streetcars themselves. Photo Gomaco Trolley Company. We tend to think of streetcars as operating on a fixed guideway.  The majority of the world’s streetcar systems, however, move between two of them, the unobtrusive rails in the ground and the power lines that run overhead...

Like Peas and Carrots: Co-locating facilities and transit

  For more than 100 Years the Reading Terminal Market has been the grocer, deli, cheese shop, bakery, and so mucyh else to commuters in Philadelphia. Steam Locamotives once stopped overhead but now Reading is served underground by SEPTA. Photo Scheib Shoppers could always tell when the train arrived by the sound of 700,000 pounds of steel laboring to a halt a few dozen feet overhead.  The Reading...

The Space Between: shaping community with transit

This photo simulation juxtaposes a modern streetcar vehicle (photographed in Tacoma Washington) with the newly built home of the Live Arts, a community theater in downtown Charlottesville. Image by Okerlund Associates. by Gary Okerlund and Todd Gordon Charlottesville, a small city in central Virginia with a population of 40,000, has been home to three presidents, Madison, Monroe, and most famously...

All Together Now

“Always do more than is required of you.”  General George S. Patton Time was, some folks did not get out as much as they may have liked.  Sidewalks were obstacle courses, parking lots deserts, and staircases mountains.  Getting around could be very difficult for people with disabilities.  They got some relief with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which required bathroom stalls...

Preemptive Strike

A transit stop inventory and improvement plan can stave off lawsuits and make transit’s most common asset a bit less common. This stop, on a curb, at a curve, attached to a stop sign is not just unattractive; it could be dangerous. Courtesy Nelson Nygaard. Shopkeepers who want to mind the store better mind the door.  That rhyme is inspired by a 2005 study by the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI),...

Busload of Low-Hanging Fruit

The view of downtown Tallahassee from Florida State’s Westcott Fountain, 2004. Beauty does little to diminish the chasm that exists between two hilltops; the view from one to the other can be lovely, even spectacular, but traversing that space can still be difficult from the steepness of the grade or from obstacles on the path.  So it is in Tallahassee, Florida, where on one peak of College...

Getting to U

The transit map for Madison, Wisconsin shows a thick gray band running along University Avenue south of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (UW).  Far from a blank on the map, it actually represents a space so dense with bus routes – 13 weekday routes – that any attempt to represent each of them would have rendered an illegible, varicolored spaghetti.  Metro, the City of Madison’s transit...